Then came the flare of a weapon from the farther group, several of them. Warrior went down, limbs threshing, air droning from resonance chambers.
“Stop them!” Raen shouted at the azi. The insist charged, ran into their concentrated fire: five, six, seven of them downed One scuttled off, slipping on the floor, a limb damaged. Two shielded that retreat with their own bodies. They were the sacrifices. Raen took one. The azi butchered the other with their fire.
They were alone, then. Humans lay tangled with dead majat. She looked about her, at majat still convulsing in deaththroes: those would go on for some minutes . . . there was no intelligence behind it. Merek Eln and Parn Kest were down, along with their companions from ITAK, and one of the guard azi. Bystanders were dead. A siren began to sound. It was already too late for the victims of bite: they had long since stopped breathing.
Blue Warrior still moved. She left the wall and the two living azi guards and went out into the center of the bloody floor, where Warrior lay, in a seeping of clear majat fluids. She held out her hand and it knew her.
Air sucked into the chambers. Auditory palps extended, trembling.
“Taste,” it begged of her.
“Reds didn’t get it,” she said. “We took them all.”
“Yesss.”
Someone cried out, down the corridor. More tall shapes had entered, moving in haste: she flung up her hand, forbidding the azi to fire.
“Blues have come,” she said. Warrior attempted to rise, but had no control of its limbs. She gave it room, and the blues scattered human medical personnel and what security forces had arrived. They crossed the last interval cautiously, stiff and sidling, until Raen showed her right hand, and they recognised her for blue-hive Kontrin.
Then they came in a rush. Some went at once to the fallen reds, taking taste, booming to each other in majat language, and two bent over Warrior.
Taste passed, long and complex, the mandibles of living and dying locked. Then the first Warrior drew back, seeming disoriented. The second took taste, in that strange semblance of a kiss. Other blues came. Somewhere a human wept, audibly. Medical personnel tried quietly to drag victims away from the area. Raen stood still. A third, a fourth Warrior bent over the fallen Kalind blue. The message was being distributed as far as Warrior’s fluids could suffice.
The fifth one breathed something in majat language; Warrior sighed an answer. Then the Istran blue’s jaws closed, and Warrior’s head rolled free.
“Kontrin,” another intoned, facing her.
“I am Raen Meth-maren. Tell your Mother so, Warrior. This-unit was from Kalind. Mother will know. Can you reach your hill safely from here?”
“Yesss. Must go now. Haste.”
It turned away. Separate Warriors gathered up the head and body of Warrior, lest other hives read any portion of its message. Grouped, they turned and scuttled out.
Two remained.
One came forward, Istran blue, auditory palps extended in sign of peaceful approach. It bowed itself and opened its mandibles. It was Istra’s gift, the fifth Warrior, the one who had tasted and killed. In a sense, it was Warrior: the thread continued.
Raen touched its scent-patches, accepted and gave taste in the insist kiss. It backed, disturbed as Warrior had been disturbed; but it had Warrior’s knowledge of her, and Grouped, with a delicate touch of the chelae.
“Meth-maren,” it breathed. Its fellow came forward, and likewise desired taste; Raen gave it, and saw distress in the working of mandibles and the flutter of palps. It resolved its conflict after a moment, touched at her.
They were hers. They followed, as she crossed the littered floor. The two guard azi were still standing against the wall; no one had claimed them, and they seemed in a state of shock. They had lost their employers. They had failed. Merek Eln and Parn Kest were dead, both bitten. One of the businessmen was decapitated; the others had been bitten. So had the third guard azi, and a number of bystanders.
The luggage carrier had been thrust back into a recess beyond the counter. Raen walked that way, and found Jim, jammed within that recess, sitting with his knees tucked up and both hands clutching a gun set upon them. His face was white; his teeth chattered; he had the gun braced and stable.